there is a wall before me
gets higher as I walk towards it
so wide that I cannot turn my head
footings deep of the rock on which I stand

I thought there was a door once
but I can never see where I want to
I thought to climb it for there was a dawn which crept along its
battlements but it is featureless it silently radiates grey with ochre stains of nausea

hopeless
but that I have come such a long way
I shall just have to walk through it without
knowing where to go sure only of every step I take

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noticing my easy habit
of judging others disdainfully
I looked at the crowd around
the Airman’s Memorial
and offered that up to the hope of
ease between all
as the trumpet blew
reveille

the Airmans’ Memorial is a tiny walled garden on Ashdown Forest marking the place where an aircraft crashed on the way back from a sortie during the 2nd World War; a service a Remebrance is held there every year

le mot just
the piquant phrase
the simple model rising magnificent
from cavalcades
of stoic tumbling

threads through like
weave which clothes me
presentable to the world …

but no one sees the
emperor’s clothes of
such fine thread it cannot
be seen, no wise child
to point and exclaim
the hang and drape
to put an end to all step –
“look, mummy, that man
is not an emperor!”

less than naked
I am seen right through
adrift of discourse
I step with stubborn countenance,
all the better to
stare myself into existence,

awkward and
hidden away in some attic
lest I lose [what I haven’t
got] self-contained in trembling
vanity, secretive in hope
of things to come, desparate
in tragedy that my grimy
portrait might be seen …

wander, wander
around the flowers, smell
their colour, breathe their
light and let the light rain
fall in shards of rainbow,
cleansing with love –

retirement #3 when in Granada … visit the Alhambra, and visit the Generalife gardens … [if you have booked up to three months ahead]; on the walk up to the palaces are trees and shrubs which are plenty-watered by sprinklers, in the morning sun the sprays will often catch a rainbow at their edge; the bordered captions in the poem are comic-conjunctives, there is a beginning, middle and end being told here, folks; the mantra: thaya tha om gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi soha, is the mantra of Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom; it can be somewhat semantically translated as “it’s like this: [everything is] gone, gone, completely gone, completely and perfectly gone with no loss, enlightened [dispersed, dispelled] all-right!”; but what’s ‘gone’: “the slings and arrows of outrageous romance” … of one’s self and the whole world positioned awkward to placate its mewling little story, as stolen by Joni Mitchell, who was talking too much at the time, from ‘Willy the Shake’;

did Dad leaving
trigger my sense of revolution or
my sense of depression
that there is no purpose
in the world
that I would eventually have to find the courage
to face those new tremors,
but five years on,
there, between the given textures
already cheap and fraying

or did revolution trigger Dad to leave
and find some other way
to find some truer nature?

-O~~~

I didn’t want the headphones, now
I didn’t want the commentary
all safely wrapped and bordered
so I kept my own eyes
open and saw 50 year old memorabilia
strangely mute, now
despite the peacock-print

and little in between
save shuffling overcoats with
no sense of direction where to go
save their right of individual
way

~~~O-

I don’t think I want the revolution
anymore –
away with your awkward sex! –
I want to know the innate freedom
I trust I have already,
save for my sense of right of way

I cried for fifty years later that evening
it is hard to lose your way returning home
cut up and turning in circles
hoping for the right lane
lights on and direction to go
everywhere
signed
and passing overhead
it is hard to arrive
toe to toe
with a fifty year old overcoat
with no face
but a blinking eye
and me with no headphones

beepbeep

on 30th October 2016, I visited the Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition @You Say You Want a Revolution’ – Records and Rebels 1966-1970 (a birth day present, thank you, Carol); my Dad left our family on 2nd November 1967, my eighth birthday, and the divorce became final by 1969; I think it was Brigitte Bardot who said something about the ‘tremors’ which were felt in the late 60s, but few who had the ‘courage’ to face them, but I can’t seem to find the quote verbatim; we got a bit lost, at first, driving back from west London

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… Mark; remember …

"... the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe to find ashes.
~ Annie Dillard